Jon’s blog

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

In honour of Labour Day welcome to Writing 401, Practice. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. Technique and theory are all well and good, but without practice they are nothing. Nothing. If a man knows everything there is to know about grammar and style, if he knows how to weave a perfect story or depict a character so real it breaks your heart, if he understands how to construct a world that will capture your imagination—if he can do all this but never actually puts pen to paper, he is not a writer. On the other hand take a hormone-ridden teenager who has no conception of style, who doesn’t think of writing as an art because it doesn’t involve paint, and who hacks his way through Sonic the Hedgehog or Snape / Spock fan-fiction. This kid is a writer. Why? Because he writes. It doesn’t matter if his stories are graceless and perverse. It doesn’t matter if his grammar is abominable, if his characters are dimensionless or borrowed. He writes. He qualifies. The following are a set of practices that may help you qualify too.

1. Balance, II

   Write a story twice. In the first version, use short simple sentences, no more words than necessary, no semicolons and generally minimal punctuation, and present no overt themes. In the second version, write as extravagantly as you please—but do it well: it’s not the same as writing poorly—and narrate whatever digressions and themes arise. Set both versions aside for a while and later rewrite a single version from memory, with whatever balance of style comes naturally.

2. Show vs. Tell, IV

   As in the previous section, write a story twice. In the first version, expose your characters’ thoughts, motives, revelations, everything. Write it from an intimate perspective, a real internal monologue, probably but not necessarily first person. In the second version, expose nothing. Give only the external view of events. Leave every conclusion unspoken so that the reader must come to her own. Set both versions aside for a while and later rewrite a single version from memory, with whatever balance of showing and telling comes naturally.

3. Read

   The first practice in writing is reading. It’s also the only practice in this course which does not involve your own writing. Read, read, read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read works in the genres you like to write. Read works in genres you’d never write. Read famous authors, read obscure authors. Read authors you adore, read authors you despise. Read gold, read shit.

   The artistic process begins with imitation. First we copy the masters, either directly or in flattering mimicry. Then comes assimilation. This is when we incorporate several influences and begin to introduce themes and turns of our own devising. Finally we reach the stage of innovation. Our influences are so numerous and finely enmeshed with our own invention and tastes that our product is unique, never before seen, not yet imagined.

   Although it may seem like reading is more important in the initial stages of this process, it is in fact equally important at all stages. It is always important. If you are a writer then reading is your fuel.

   By reading we learn what’s been done before us, what territories have been explored, what twists utilized, what standbys and clichés established. We also learn what territories remain, and which are just begging for a new expedition. More than once I learned by reading that an idea I had was not only already done but already tired and passé. Let’s say for example I were to write a vampire story. (God forbid.) Lo and behold it’s been done before. That doesn’t mean I can’t still write it, but it does mean I don’t have to waste narrative time explaining certain common knowledge points of the mythos. Vampires drink blood, burn in sunlight, etc. It also means I may choose to spin or even reinvent other points. Maybe my vampires suffer from liver disease. Maybe my vampires thirst for feces instead of blood. Maybe my vampires sparkle.

   Would you trust a skinny cook? A stupid teacher? An unscarred stuntman? Read, read, read.

4. Critique

   In addition to reading what’s published, read what’s unpublished. Join a workshop in your city or an online writer’s group. If you can’t find one you like, start one. Find your peers and read their work. Let them read yours. Learn both to enjoy the writing of your peers and to weigh its merits as art. Tell them what you think. This part works, that part doesn’t, this drew me in, that bored me, this character I loved, that one I didn’t believe for a second, this plotline is overused, that device is brilliant.

   As you learn to critique in greater depth and detail, as you become more articulate in expressing the principles of good writing as you understand them, the better you’ll approach your own work with a critical eye. You’ll plot it out better in the beginning and so face fewer blocks when you draft. You’ll have a clearer sense of your characters and their purpose, both as imaginary people and as devices component in your story. You’ll recognize and control how the events and descriptions in your story convey moods and themes to the reader.

   Odds are you’ll find a lot of peer review is useless praise, and most of what’s left is undue insult. Odds are you’ll give this kind of critique to others until you find your balance. That’s just how odds work. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

   As a critic, keep reading and reviewing and improving at both. Learn to adapt your suggestions for writers of varied temperament and skill level.

   As a recipient of critique, thick up your skin. The tone of a critique or of criticism is irrelevant. Your work has no emotion inherent in it that leaps off the page and possesses the reader. It only evokes. If a critic shows emotion, it’s because your work has evoked it, or because the critic came with it to the table. When you accept a critique, first trim away everything except the points made. Then trim the points you don’t find true or helpful. (Do this only after careful reflection, and don’t let your own bias interfere with valid observations.) Use what’s left to improve your work as you see fit. Resist the urge to critique the critic. No ifs ands or buts. Just say thanks.

5. Mix It Up

   In general we aim to write good stories well. Whenever someone tells me they feel blocked I suggest writing a bad story, or trying to write a story poorly. Naturally the artistic instinct takes over and gets the person writing well despite their so-called block. Works every time.

   I’d also suggest this in general, though. Write a bad story poorly. Write a bad story well. Write a good story poorly. It’s important to know the difference. In art the best way of knowing is doing, and contrast is an excellent teacher, if a blunt one.

6. Back To Basics

   Another useful exercise is to write a story using only essential words: nouns, verbs, pronouns and conjunctions. In other words, write a story no adjectives or adverbs. Or, take a story you’ve already written and strip it of adjectives and adverbs.

   Read it through. Plain, isn’t it? But functional. It gets the job done. Nothing gets in its way. It’s a Spartan.

   Now, with this new perspective on the story and what it’s really about, build it back up. Insert adjectives that genuinely enhance the meaning, that actually tell the reader something she doesn’t know. Insert whatever adverbs, if any, the sentences genuinely need in order to function.

7. Give In To The Dark Side

   Write a story in the dark. It can be the first draft of a story you haven’t outlined at all, or the second draft of a story you’re not sure how to revise, or the Nth draft of a story you’ve rewritten over and over again. By in the dark I don’t mean in pitch black, but in just enough light to write by but not enough light to read by.

   This exercise is, to use the vernacular, throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. You won’t have a chance to edit as you go. You’ll forget all but the gist of the story while you’re still writing it. You’ll have no outline, no character sketches, no dictionary or thesaurus. It’s just you and the story.

   For extra credit in Balance, I and Show vs. Tell, IV, write the final unified versions of the stories in the dark.

8. Read Aloud

   In Dialogue, II we discussed the writer as an actor responsible for portraying the whole cast. To help in dialogue and the sound of narrative in general try reading your stories aloud. Learn to hear what you’re writing. It’s one thing to keep in mind a caveat against run-on sentences, and another entirely to feel yourself run out of breath as you’re writing one.

9. Queryize, Synopsisify

   A query is a brief letter from an author to an agent meant to hook the latter’s interest in a novel. A synopsis as you may know is a point-by-point summary of a novel. Both are gruelling to write. So why should novelists have all the fun? Query and synopsis writing are skills every writer should have. They stand to improve your drafting and especially your outlining in ways you can’t imagine.

   A typical query letter provides an agent with the prospective novel’s title, word count, and genre. It also includes a teaser summary of two or three paragraphs. The first paragraph should answer these questions, each in not many more than twenty words:

   • What is the main character’s name?
   • What problem or choice does the main character face?
   • Who wants to foil the main character’s plan and why?

   The subsequent paragraphs indicate how this setup unfolds. They don’t give away the ending, although they may hint at it. Instead they convey the tension of the story. A query is bait.

   A synopsis on the other hand is factual, journalistic. It tells an agent or editor exactly what takes place in the story, who is who, who does what, why they do it, where, how and when.

   Where a query is difficult to write because it’s so short, a synopsis is difficult to write because it’s so resistant to style. It’s hard to convey any tension when the story is laid out on the table like a dissected lab animal. It is exactly because they’re hard to write that you should learn to write them.

   A synopsis is just an outline written after-the-fact. If you can write an outline, you can write a synopsis. Conversely, if you can write a synopsis, your powers of outlining will multiply. If you get blocked in a draft all you have to do is step back and work on the synopsis. Its clear, factual points will remind you where the story’s going, what needs to happen, what theme you’ve forgotten to explore and which as a result has left the last scene without a bridge to the next.

   A query is just a taut, streamlined version of the blurb you give your friends when they ask what your book is about. It’s a sales pitch. It condenses the most important aspects of the story and delivers them in rich, punchy sentences. Knowing how to boil your story down to its bare essentials will help you keep track of those essentials yourself. It’s easy when drafting to get carried away with subplots, intricately described locales, conceptual explorations. If you get lost like this all you have to do is step back and work on the query. It’ll bring you face to face with the story’s beating heart.

   For extra credit, write taglines for your stories too. A tagline is a single sentence—or a few sentences cleverly punctuated but still about as long as one—whose job is to convey the barest elements of the story and to hook the interest of a potential reader. For example, a tagline for Romeo & Juliet might go something like: Two households, one love. Shit just got real.

10. Write, Motherfucker

    Don’t find the time, make the time. Don’t think about it, do it. Just sit down and start. There’s a little voice in your head right now that’s saying you could stop reading this and go write instead. Listen to it.

    Now that you’re back from writing—or you already wrote for the day, or you’re a coward and didn’t write like you should have, or you’re a casual reader and not a writer at all—consider the basic math of the writing equation. If you write for a half hour each weekday, that’s ten hours a month, a hundred and twenty hours per year. Let’s say you write an average of five hundred words in those half hour sessions. That’s ten thousand words per month. That’s a hundred and twenty thousand words per year.

    To give you some perspective, most authorities draw the minimum novel length at fifty thousand words. The average novel length is probably between seventy and one hundred thousand words. Over the hundred thousand word mark you’ll find fat fantasy books and Ayn Rand. Heart of Darkness clocks in under forty thousand words. The Trial is about eighty thousand. Moby Dick runs two hundred and eleven thousand. War & Peace, while not the longest novel ever published, weighs in at nearly six hundred thousand words.

    That means writing even so little as a half hour a day, five hundred words, not including weekends, you’re drafting and revising a novel per year.

    Stephen King says the first million words are practice. For a guy with such formulaic stories and lukewarm prose he sure knows a hell of a lot about the theory and the profession of writing. I trust his estimate. Put in eight or nine years at this 120,000 words per year rate and you’re bound to be writing decently, if not well, if not incredibly.

    Don’t find the time, make the time. Most people spend a half hour a day on the can. A half hour laying awake before they fall asleep. A half hour channel surfing even though nothing good is on. A half hour shuffling around the house picking things up and putting them back down. If you’ve got a half hour to waste on this shit, you’ve got a half hour to write. If you’ve got a half hour you can probably bulk up to an hour in a couple months once writing is engrained in your routine. If you can write a thousand words per day you’re laughing. That’s time in a year for a novel, a dayjob, a family, even a vacation, without even breaking a sweat.

    Write, motherfucker.

~J

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

Welcome to Writing 301, Theory. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. This is the writing you do when you’re not actually writing. That is to say, when you’re not drafting. It pertains in part to style, in part to your attitude and general approach to the craft. These are strengths you will accumulate over time. By practice and reflection, mostly, but also by study. When you draft you’re putting theory to the test. Then you alter the theory according to how pleased you are with the results, and try again. In this way theory empowers technique, and technique proves and refines theory.

1. Balance, I

   The idea of balance is so broad and already-implicit in these courses that I hesitate to address it openly. Nevertheless it bears addressing. So far we’ve examined a number of elements of style. In order to write well we must not only master each element, but master their use in concert.

   At one end of the prose spectrum we have the Hemingway type, exclusive and ascetic. At the other end we have the Faulkner type, involved and prolix. Both were excellent writers. Both styles valid. I happen to believe not all writers fall between. Those who have found their voice do. Those who have not found their voice fall somewhere outside that spectrum. Or below it. Or they just plain fall.

   I nearly put quotation marks around found their voice. It is a tremendous cliché in discussing writing, and tremendously vague. But as all clichés it has a legitimate root. It’s an airy-fairy way of saying establish your style. Decide your balance. Each of us has a natural instinct to communicate. Writing is not a natural act, even if storytelling is. When we write and reflect, write and reflect, we’re just as much developing a skill as uncovering that innate storytelling instinct and learning to apply it in artifice.

   How heavily do your stories rely on dialogue? Are your best transitions made with description, introspection, flat out scene breaks? How much exposition is too much? How many dots do you prefer to connect for the reader? How remotely or intimately do you like to reveal the setting, be it fictitious or well-known?

   The more you refine your style or find your voice, the more comfortable you’ll be writing. Readers are like children. They can sense that shit. When you labour in the dark the reader has no light to guide her. She hits the wall. The wall is you. On the other hand, when you hit your stride, she’s carried along light as a feather in your slipstream. When she gets to The End she’ll have a smoke and hit the book store looking for the sequel.

2. Punctuation, II

   To carry over from the last section, experiment with punctuation until you find a style for yourself. I gripe about misused semicolons but at least they tend to be misused consistently. I’ve quit reading a lot of books because the author seemed to have no sense of definite function when placing his marks. In one sentence he’d use a semicolon to join independent clauses, in the next sentence a dash. One side note he’d escape with parentheses, the next with commas. Not to mention those sentences rendered labyrinthine by a gamut of marks all thrown in together at cross-purposes.

   If you’ve read this far then you know I favour simple, artful prose, in which punctuation is the tiger’s whiskers rather than its stripes. Whether or not I pull it off well is open to debate. In any case your taste may differ. You might adore constructing sentences like puzzles to be solved before the next may be read. You might despise punctuation and compose so as to use as few marks as possible. You might be anywhere in between. So experiment, refine. Be conscious of your use. Be consistent.

3. Show vs. Tell, III

   This is not so much a further exploration of the subject. I’m satisfied with the coverage in 201. Rather, I’d like to share an analogy which may shed additional light on the subject.

   Every work of art that I consider great has the same effect as a Rorschach test. The artwork imitates shapes and colours found in nature. On a canvas or in a book these natural elements are loosed from their moorings in the world, loosed from context. Isolation opens them to interpretation. A rabbit we see in a field on our way home from work is just a rabbit in a field. A rabbit on a canvas may represent something. A rabbit in a David Lynch movie, I get chills just thinking of everything it might convey. How he might use the thing out of its natural context to invoke some reaction in the deep angles our hearts. In the Rorschach test we see these vague, familiar shapes and we tend to assign meaning to them. Did I say we tend to? Hell, we practically line up to assign meaning. Is it because we’re so uncomfortable with the lack of context that we invent order to impose on the chaos? Are we just curious by nature, problem-solvers, seeking patterns or signs? Is it that there is no shape we have not seen, that everything looks like something else no matter how disfigured?

   I haven’t got a damned clue. Maybe that’s why I’m still so enamoured of the mystery. Maybe the pattern I’m looking for is the pattern of looking itself. Even that I can’t be sure of, and so much the better. If I knew for certain, then there’d be no surprise left in experiencing new art. No revelation.

   The beauty and cosmic terror of the Rorschach test, as Alan Moore so masterfully explored it, is that no matter what we see, no matter why we see it, we can never, ever be 100% certain it’s there.

4. Economy, III

   As with Show vs. Tell this isn’t so much an expansion on the previous Economy sections as another way of looking at the subject.

   The line that’s had the most influence on my approach to economy in writing comes from Jeff Smith’s comic series Bone. The hero is chased to a cave by some rat creatures. A dragon peeks out and says ‘Boo,’ which scares them off. The hero rebukes the dragon for not being able to do something cool or mystical. The dragon belches fire all over the hero and says, ‘Never play an ace when a two will do.’

   The poker analogy extends itself perfectly. Most of the time we’re writing number cards, occasionally face cards, every now and then an ace. If the deck were all aces the game would be no fun. Ace-high hands are exciting and pay off big, but the hands between are your real bread and butter, and you don’t need aces to win big. Four twos is better than 99% (plus some fraction I haven’t got patience for) of other possible hands.

   One sign of amateur writing is zeal. In my experience, it’s especially common in the work of creative writing students. There’s an urge to put a new spin on everything. Why play a two when you can play an ace? Aces, aces, everywhere. It’s tired. It’s boring. Pace yourself. Keep in mind adages like ‘gilding the lily’ and ‘reinventing the wheel.’

   In my teens I fell into a lead guitar position in a band long before I had enough experience even to call myself a rhythm player. Rather than pace myself, I tried to compensate for inexperience with activity. I noodled my way through every song, deathly afraid I wasn’t playing interestingly enough. Ignorant of the other components and players of the song. Forgetting everything I knew about enjoying music as a listener myself. In hindsight of course I recognize the mistake. Nevertheless it taught me a valuable lesson. The structure of a story is similar to the structure of a song. There are verses of newly covered ground. There are choruses where themes are revisited. There are transitions and breaks where those themes evolve. There are solos. My, how there are solos.

   Eric Clapton kicks off a lot of songs with a little lick, a little riff, then he backs right off into rhythm for the verses. One of the most renown and soulful rock n’ roll guitarists alive and still most of what he plays is plain old rhythm. Plain old deuces and threes. He tosses down a face card every now and then as an accent. When it’s time for aces, he’s already played the other cards and built his way up and he lays them aces on the table like they were hammers and there’s nothing you can do to stop him.

   So if you’re tempted to spice up your story with clever phrasings and your own slant on grammatical clichés, okay, that’s fine and dandy, just be discerning about it. Don’t exhaust half your vocabulary in description of some unimportant character. Don’t try to coin new figures of speech just to tell us the waiter poured some coffee. Save the innovation for the big scenes, the main characters, the crucial actions, the thematic vistas. The reader will absorb the import of those moments that much more for the simultaneous amping up of both events and syntax. As with the formula discussed in Narrative Math, this is a congruence of content and style that will lend grace and power to your writing.

   Never play an ace when a two will do.

5. Listen

   The most important piece of advice I have in the arena of theory is to listen. Listen. Trust your gut. It doesn’t matter what you believe—whether art comes from inspiration internal or external, from God, from spirits, from nature, or from no inspiration at all but all creativity is simply laying bricks and a finished work is no more than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t alter the measurable facts of writing. Before you sit down to write, the story is not apparent in the world. After you stand up from writing, the story is physically evident on paper or on a computer screen. Before you act there is nothing. Once you’ve acted there is something. That something comes from somewhere. I don’t give that somewhere a name. You may.

   The one belief I have is that it’s best to leave belief at the door when you enter the writing space. Leave yourself, leave your self. As a species we have a tendency to think we know what’s best. It is a chronic, epidemic, unaccountably destructive tendency. Our biology gifts us with fine instincts. Feel a spider on your arm and you’ll flinch to get it away. Sit in a dark room and you’ll bristle when someone approaches. Other instincts are more overt, like hunger and tiredness. Bill Cosby said intellectuals are people who go to school to study what other people do naturally. It is the intellect that gets in the way of instinct. When my body tells me I’m thirsty I often think, ‘I’m busy, I’ll get a glass of water in a minute.’ An hour later I wonder why the hell I’m so thirsty.

   I’m not listening.

   In writing, whenever I reach a point where I’m trying to reason my way out of a corner, I have to pause and sit back. Maybe I’ve hit a knot in the plotline, reached a scene in a chapter which I just can’t resolve. In any case once I sit back and take stock of the dilemma it’s obvious I can’t reason my way out because I’m the one who reasoned my way in there in the first place.

   Somewhere, out there or in here, the story already has a shape (in fact or potential), and the story knows its shape, and the story is telling itself but its voice is quiet. Much quieter than my loudmouth brain.

   So I quit the Chaplin routine, trying to pick up my hat and kicking it out of reach with each step. I shelve that unresolved scene. I put aside that knotty plot outline. I put down the pen. I listen. What comes next varies but only in the incidentals. First I retrace the story or scene thus far, point by point. At certain points alternate events suggest themselves. I think about those alternates. I imagine what might happen. My inner monologue handles these as questions. What if this happened instead? What if he said that instead? What if this character were a woman instead of a man? I hesitate to say I imagine the replies, because that’s too active a phrasing. I imagine the questions and one or more answers suggest themselves. Alternates play out in my imagination. I let one run its course, first come first serve. I might make notes during or wait until afterward. Then I let the next in line play out.

   When alternates stop suggesting themselves, I compare notes. I’m still listening. I think about each alternate in the context of the whole story. It is often immediately clear which is the way the story should unfold. This, I assume, is because I’ve been lucky enough to detach from my brain and let my instinct, my gut, do the thinking. But the gut doesn’t think, it knows. The gut is your connection to the story. The story knows itself. It tells itself. Listen and you’ll hear it. Well, when I listen I hear it, anyway. I hope it works for you too but I don’t make promises. Listen anyway. Trust your gut.

   In those cases where the proper course is not immediately clear, I might try cobbling my notes together into hybrid alternates. Or I might sleep on it. Or I’ll run it by a peer. Eventually, every knot I’ve run up against has come undone.

6. Audience

   Speaking of trust, it’s important to trust your reader. Our expectations of the reader are often inaccurate, unfair, condescending, wildly varied. This is easy and, I think, natural, because the potential audience for our work is anyone.

   If it helps, imagine a target audience. As in every industry, publishing has target markets. I don’t recommend going quite so commercial a route as writing to a demographic, only to a general typical reader. Of x sensibilities, y degree of education, z number of pets, whatever your criteria. Too demographic and I think you’ll limit the work too much before you’ve written it. No consideration whatsoever to audience and it’s easy to lose your anchor and spiral into impenetrable expectations.

   Now, that said, I aspire to this general reader rule and its contrary partner, summed up in a line delivered by Joni Mitchell in an interview: ‘I didn’t really think about audience.’

   I see a clear line between the art and the business of writing. The art is what we do out of love, because we’re bursting with it. Trapped on a desert island with nothing but a lonely death to wait for we’d still do it because that’s what we’re made to do. But, of course, we’re also cells of a civilization. We have bills to pay. We make the art for ourselves but we also want to share it. Our art has value. It is natural to ply our trade and be paid for our products or services.

   As much as I can, I try not to let these halves of the process mingle. This is where the general reader + no audience team comes into play. I know what kind of books I like. I know what kind of reader I am. Naturally, I write to myself. After feedback from peer reviewers years ago I realized that was a very narrow approach. Especially because I already know how all the dots connect. I had no idea how the picture looked from the outside, I didn’t consider an outside view at all.

   Now at the outset I consider an audience. I model the imaginary reader not on myself but on some fictitious alternate me, someone with similar taste but who has no back stage pass to the story. I determine how much I want to reveal to him and how hard I want him to work for the rest. I decide which dots to connect. Then, when I start writing, I forget about him. I’ve set up the obstacle course, now it’s time to run it. It’s inevitable that I stumble, that I knock down some hurdles. So what? That’s no reason to stop. I’ve put that audience out of mind and it stays that way until the draft is finished and it’s time to revise. Then, with the input of peer reviewers, I evaluate the dots and connections and refine them. I don’t cede much ground. I’m not a fan of compromise in style. I do, however, strive to make my abstractions as clear as possible. I might want the reader to work, but I want it to be enjoyable work. I don’t want her to suffer. I want her to be satisfied when she’s finished, having sunk her teeth into the story and savoured it, digested it, gained some nourishment from it.

7. ‘Write What You Know’

   Sound advice, right? No one writes about aliens because no one’s seen them. No one writes about murder who hasn’t committed one. No one writes epic battle scenes who hasn’t led armies against an ancient evil risen again to threaten our feudal way of life and that of our estranged buddies the elves and the dwarves. No one writes a girl who is a boy.

   The real value of this adage requires a grain of salt. I may sound like a teenaged poet, but what we all know is feelings. The range of human emotion is, with precious and hideous few exceptions, exactly the same for each of us. Every person on the planet is capable of love, fear, goodwill, greed, et cetera et cetera. Our job as writers is to know this range. To become intimate with it. To learn to depict and inflict these feelings with no more than words.

   I don’t need to kill a guy to have felt the sort of anger or frustration that could lead a person to kill. I don’t need to have driven tanks and Aston Martins in her majesty’s secret service to have felt a thrill. What I do need is to convey these feelings accurately and plausibly. I need to compose my narratives in such a way that the reader feels these things as authentically as I do, and in the same manner: by summoning them from his own experience. Whereas inauthentic writing seeks to lodge foreign objects in the reader’s eye. The inauthentic writer cries, ‘See this, feel this!’

   Of course I can write about aliens, because I’ve felt alienation, fear, isolation, a whole horde of feelings I can access in the reader. Ridley Scott tore that shit up because he had the tools and talent to invoke our memories of nyctophobia, claustrophobia, xenophobia. To insinuate them even if we’ve never experienced those fears explicitly. He and Ms. Weaver made those feelings so urgent and palpable that we couldn’t help but feel them too. Our disbelief froze in its tracks. Not because killer aliens from outer space are plausible, but because the characters with whom we connected were plausible.

   Naturally this doesn’t mean you have a free ticket to make shit up. Do the minimal research required to render your settings and events and so on plausible. Even the most realistic characters won’t save your story if it’s set in a Camelot which features flushing toilets and whose peasants are happy-go-lucky intellectuals. Write what you know, yes. If you don’t know something don’t avoid writing it but engage in learning it.

8. ‘Kill Your Darlings’

   A man who taught me a great deal of practical skill and practical knowledge once told me, ‘You know what the old man says: ya gotta be ruthless.’ I wish you could hear him. The emphasis on ruthless. The nasal impersonation of his father, a turnip farmer, passing on the wisdom of his father before him.

   This applies mostly to revision, when we bridge the gap between art-for-ourselves and art-for-sale. When we stroll back through the rows we spent so long planting and tending, and tear up all but the best, most suitable, most plausible fruits of that labour. It can be painful. But it is one of those pains that can be cathartic, if we allow it to be. It purifies the work. Not every idea cut is necessarily a waste. Not every character killed, subplot axed, description junked, chapter halved. Some just aren’t ripe. Others are pumpkins whose seeds are meant for a different field. Be ruthless in dividing the useful from the useless, but salvage what you can from the useless pile and set it aside. It may prove useful one day.

   Ruthless. From reuthe, ‘pity, compassion.’ To be ruthless is not to be cruel. It is only to be impersonal, to set aside pity. If I had a child and that child were, say, bitten by a zombie, it would be my duty as a father to set aside pity and shoot the child to save it from misery. Not for my good but for his. In writing and revision, although I don’t like equating artworks to children, it is our duty to do what’s best for the story. We must set aside our own desires—or better yet, conform our desires to those of the story—and put those unripe phrases, scenes, characters, and chapters out of their misery. We gotta be ruthless.

9. A Few Reminders

   Remember the senses and how they can be used to convey ideas and themes, how they can be used to touch the reader in. Even the most idea-heavy work has a stronger impact when the reader is drawn into the physical world of the story, rather than left to orbit it in a vacuum. It’s easy in this day of 3D block-busting CGI-out-the-yin-yang movies to forget that there are senses besides the visual, besides the THX-bombarded aural. In a book, sometimes a simple flaky bite of ground pepper can hook a reader’s imagination more swiftly and completely than ten sprawling cityscapes or thirty flaming sunsets.

   Remember also the basics of journalistic writing. Who, what, where, when, how or why. This will help keep you grounded. It will help you from straying too far off track, especially into introspection or conceptual exposition. Unless you’re Sartre, in which case who am I to argue? In which case who am I at all?

~J

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

Welcome to Writing 201, Advanced Technique. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. If 101 is black and white then 201 is shades of grey. The basics are your line, your shape. Advanced Technique is the shading that will, more than anything else, define your style. These are not rules so much as considerations. How to approach, rather than how to execute.

1. Dialogue, Part II.

   What is dialogue if it’s not plausible? It’s nothing. That’s 101 level stuff. Dialogue enters the realm of 201 because it has more dimension and function than rendering characters plausible in the reader’s estimation.

   First, it may be used to create variety in the structure of a story. It is one of a group of narrative techniques sometimes referred to as modes. Other modes being action, description, exposition, introspection, summarization, recollection, transition. Aside from the events of a story, the manner of its telling and the balance of these modes determine how good it is. (By good I mean loosely that it is well constructed, entertaining, capable of holding the reader’s attention and suspending his disbelief.) A story with too much exposition is boring. A story with too much dialogue lacks decisive motion. Et cetera.

   Second, dialogue is just as capable as narrative exposition of informing the reader. The most common note of critique I make when reading novels is, “That could have been dialogue.” This is true of amateur and professional fiction alike. Most often the author has broken up his dialogue with exposition, but occasionally the interloper is introspection or summarization. In each case it’s usually more natural, more consistent, and less likely to cause hiccups, simply to convey the info in the dialogue itself. Naturally the info must be arranged to suit the character’s delivery. It might end up incomplete, ambiguous, not entirely true. But you get the bonus of further establishing your characters by showing the reader how they treat the information.

   If the info is so crucial to the story that you can’t afford to have it misinterpreted, I’d recommend saving any relevant summarization until after the dialogue has run its course. Or, at least, until an appropriate lull occurs in the rhythm of the dialogue.

   Robert De Niro said of acting, “It’s important to indicate. People don’t try to show their feelings, they try to hide them.” This advice transposes perfectly to writing. A writer is an actor responsible for portraying the whole cast. This doesn’t mean you have to be an accomplished actor, of course. It only means you’d do well to understand the principles of a convincing performance.

   Have faith in your dialogue. Let your characters speak for themselves.

2. Show vs. Tell, Part II.

   De Niro’s advice carries over from characterization into the general level of exposition and explanation in a story. I mentioned connecting the dots. That’s a handy metaphor for explaining the advanced concepts of Show vs. Tell. To show is to give the reader dots. To tell is to connect them.

   Too much showing and not enough telling results in a story that is difficult to penetrate. The reader may draw her own conclusions about the significance, the characters and even the events of the story, but she’s not as likely to feel a connection to them. Too much telling and not enough showing results in a story that reads like a report. Its events, characters, themes and significance are all laid plainly on the table — but it’s even more rigid than that, as if only a photo of these things is laid on the table. There’s no room for the reader to interpret or to draw her own conclusions.

   Everyone’s heard the saying, “Easier said than done.” Keep this in mind when you’re writing. In most cases the easy way out is to say plainly, This character is shy, works at a bakery, and can’t carry a tune. If it’s a tertiary character and it’d be a digression to convey these qualities by showing them in a scene, then go ahead, tell it instead. If it’s your main character, though, and these qualities figure significantly in the plot, then take the time to establish them by showing the character in his natural habitat, as it were. It’s a story, not a speed date or a job interview. Let your readers get to know your characters as they would real people.

   In description, showing is the purest parts of the description, the most journalistic — the who, what, where, when of a thing. Anything that is apparent.

   He was tall and red, had dark hair, a crooked grin and a pointy tail.

   Telling is anything that can be interpreted, or that is difficult to measure.

   He was evil, intelligent, ancient.

   Notice that even in the first example we can safely assume the qualities in the second example without them being told. Tall and red, crooked smile plus tail. Most of us will have pictured something like a devil. Since it’s such a common symbol, it’s natural for us to assume he’s evil. But evil is highly subjective. We might not assume he’s intelligent. That’s a quality open to broad interpretation. Even once the character is introduced, he can still be scrutinized for interpretable qualities. You may introduce him as intelligent, but later narrate him perpetrating unintelligent acts. Ancient might tell us he’s old, but it doesn’t tell us whether or not it shows. Especially not in the context we assume given the similarity of the described character to the devil. Everyone knows the devil is supposed to be ancient but he doesn’t necessarily look it. That renders the quality moot as a descriptor.

   Better than tell us a character is like this or that, just show the character doing things which indicate those qualities. If we see this be-tailed red guy causing pain and suffering, insinuating himself into the highest echelons of society and gumming up the works, relating first-hand stories of the dawn of time, then we’ll connect all those dots on our own. In the worst case, when the author’s treasure is the reader’s trash, there aren’t any hiccups because you haven’t labelled anything treasure for the reader to dispute.

   Extend this to other nouns — the places and things you describe. Must you say, It was an eerie scene? Show us instead a disused Victorian manor on a precipice under moonlight with bats flying around and howling wind, odds are we’ll catch on that it’s eerie.

   This may lead to variation in how your readers perceive the meanings and themes of your work, but that’s part of the fun in reading. Interpreting. We view everything through the lens of our experience and beliefs anyway, there’s only so much you can do as an author to ensure each reader unearths uniform themes in your work.

3. Economy, Part II.

   In the commerce of fiction words are not the sole currency. There are scenes, settings, characters, action, themes, and so on. Look on each of these with an economic eye.

   That tertiary character who shows up in a late chapter and just hangs around, is he worth keeping? Does the plot hinge on a decision he makes? Is he the foil for revealing an important characteristic of the protagonist? Does he provide a moment of levity to counterbalance the previous heavy scene? If he doesn’t serve a clear purpose, cut him. Likewise, if there’s a clear purpose that needs to be served, find a natural way to fill the role. (By natural I mean let the solution arise from within the story, rather than inserting an arbitrary solution, deus ex machina.)

   You may have heard of the rule called Chekhov’s Gun. To paraphrase Chekhov: if there’s a gun on the mantle in act one, it had better come into play in act two or three. Chekhov I think meant it in a fairly literal sense, but I and more contemporary literary theory take it in a broader sense. The gun doesn’t have to be fired. Instead it may symbolize a character’s past or internal state, or it may punctuate the story’s theme of violence or colonial oppression or whatever the case may be. But if you include a conspicuous element, it had better be there for a reason.

   As for themes, it’s tempting, especially in first novels, to explore as many themes as possible. To convey a number of messages. To share with the reader every epiphany you’ve experienced thus far in life.

   Resist.

   The more themes you explore, the less potent each theme becomes. Naturally any story will touch on multiple subjects, depict a variety of relationships, convey an array of messages both intended and not. These are ingredients whose proportion and combination determine the overall flavour of the piece. Also, if you want a writing career that lasts beyond the first few stories, you’ll want to save up those experiences and mete them out. Don’t spend it all in one place.

4. Description, Part II.

   A description is capable of being more than the sum of its parts. Even the description of a simple object can communicate a great deal to the reader — tone, theme, texture. For example:

   He crossed the street into his old neighbourhood. The houses sat shoulder to shoulder, windows open to the spring air.

   He crossed the street into his old neighbourhood. The houses crowded along the street, windows like eyes vacant of whatever soul once lay behind them.

   Both examples depict the exact same scene, but in a completely different tone. They set a mood without ever saying what the mood is. Especially in a story which shows more than it tells of its characters, moody description can establish pathos and give the reader a view to those characters’ perceptions.

5. Openings & Closings.

   I’m a big fan of strong, simple openings. Nine out of ten books I pick up in the bookshop I put right back down because the openings fail to interest me in the slightest. It’s not always for the same reason, though. One opens with Elmore Leonard’s hated rundown of the weather. Another opens with a conversation in medias res — a boring conversation at that, or one which dully sets up the plot or dumps a heap of back-story in the reader’s lap. The list of weak openings goes on.

   A strong opening can be descriptive, expository, dialogue, whatever you decide is best for the story. Its strength isn’t dependent on mode. Its strength depends, rather, on simplicity and relevance.

   A simple opening functions in prose as a thesis statement functions in an essay. It is brief enough to establish a place, a person or a concept central to the plot. It does not begin a circuitous path which arrives several paragraphs later at the introduction of a central figure. It also does not wind or digress, hiding the direction and tone of the story rather than establishing it. That’s what I mean by relevance. The opening should give a clear sense of the story’s essence. Whether it’s clear in a literal, symbolical or emotional sense is up to you.

   As for closings, I’m a big fan of punch. I like to finish a story and have to sit back for a minute to steady myself from an impact likewise literal, symbolic or emotional. I like a closing that leaves me not with the need for points to be clarified, but with guesses as to what the story’s ambiguities might mean. A strong closing makes you want to read the story again. A strong opening you’ll understand twice as well once you’ve reached the end.

   This isn’t just creative advice, it’s business advice. Literary agents read hundreds of manuscripts per month, some per week. You’ve got about five pages, tops, to make an impression.

6. Perspective.

   Briefly, when deciding between first or third person, present or past tense — or, you brave soul, second person or future tense — consider the effect each has on the narrative. First person is intimate, directly involved. Third person is remote even when its exposition gets intimate. Present tense creates a sense of urgency and heightens the tension of events as they occur. Past tense is stable, perhaps more convincing because it indicates that events have already taken place and are not invented.

   There are a number of nuances comprehended by the available perspectives. Is the narrator limited or omniscient? Is the narrator reliable? I’ll leave you to learn the differences on your own, since I have no strong opinions on their use.

   The only other note I have on perspective comes from John Gardner. He made a point in his manual on fiction that it’s often unnecessary to explain, in description, that a character is witnessing said description. He saw that this had happened, She heard footsteps, They noticed Christ floating down in some clouds, etc. If you establish that the character is present, anything you then describe the reader will assume the character has observed. If the character misses a detail you are free to tell us he missed it. A lot of he saw / she heard kind of stuff is hiccup territory. It only reminds the reader that he’s not involved, he’s only reading about fictional people engaged in fictional enterprises.

7. Narrative Math.

   Last but certainly not least of these advanced techniques is narrative math. I hew to a formula of narrative time : narrative importance. Anything I describe, expose, summarize, etc., I try to do so in proportion to its importance to the story.

   If a character makes only a brief appearance, I’ll only, if at all, describe her briefly. The progress of the story doesn’t hinge on the colour of her eyes. If the majority of a story takes place in a single city or building, I’ll describe the place in appropriate detail, summarize its history at appropriate length. (If it’s a real place — say, Paris — I’ll probably favour trivia which bears on the story or sets the mood, rather than go on about La Tour Eiffel, Notre Dame, or other shit everybody knows about already.) If an event in the past contributes greatly to later events in the story, I’ll indulge in a recollection, a.k.a. flashback. If the same event isn’t consequential I’ll instead relegate it to an appropriately brief mention in dialogue or whatever mode suits it best. If an action is characteristic of the protagonist, if it demonstrates her thought process or establishes a definite quality of her person, I’ll take appropriate pains to narrate it.

   This ties in to economy. If buddy has a smoke, I’m not going to waste time explaining the minute steps involved. There’s nothing new there for many readers. (Read: for anyone older than four or five.) Why go on about how He drew the cigarette out of the packet, tapped it on the desk, pinched it between his lips, flipped open his Zippo and cupped the flame to the end of the cigarette? In rare cases you can use this kind of detail to set the mood, to create tension by drawing out a scene when we know there’s some serious action on the way. Mostly, though, no one cares. Just smoke the damned thing and get on with the story.

That’s the story of my life: get on with the story.

~J

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

Welcome to Writing 101, Basic Technique. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. I’m not going to cover every possible technique here, just a selection which I find particularly helpful to know, or which are commonly misunderstood or ignored, or which everyone learns in school but, for whatever reason, bear repeating or rehashing. A number of these techniques span several levels of skill, so we’ll revisit them accordingly in later courses. For now it’s just the basics.

1. Punctuation, Part I.

   First a brief refresher of the problem marks:

   • A semicolon joins ideas related enough to share a sentence but not continuous enough to be joined by a comma. ;
   • A colon introduces a list or an apposite. :
   • Parentheses delimit thoughts outside the narrative flow but relevant to it. (Like so.)
   • An em dash can function as parentheses—by inserting a related thought or detail—or, chameleon that it is, as a colon—by offering a dramatic introduction.
   • An ellipsis indicates an omission of quoted text. . . .

   Now, why do I call them problem marks?

   The semicolon. Where do I begin? First, it’s overused. What’s more, it’s easy to overuse. I rarely see discerning use of the semicolon. If you give it an inch, it’ll take a mile. It’s an easy way to make your writing look highbrow. Second, given that its function is halfway between a comma and a period, its use is arbitrary. I say go big or go home: separate your clauses with a comma or a period. Next time you read an article or a story imagine each semicolon replaced by a period or a comma + conjunction. Does the article lose anything? Does the narrative have less impact? In almost every case I find the narrative stronger for the clear cut punctuation. Third, one of my biggest pet peeves and a sure sign of amateur writing: semicolons are often misused in place of colons. I don’t know where this started but it’s rampant in online articles and occasionally in published novels, which must have been printed when the editors were all on vacation.

   I have to tell you something; I love you.

   Look at that. I found it in the dictionary next to the entry for ugly. The worst part is that the semicolon’s function is so wishy-washy that one could argue its use in this case is perfectly acceptable. All the more reason not to give it that inch.

   Parentheses aren’t a problem so much in a technical sense as a stylistic sense. They’re cute, and they can be used to humorous effect, much like footnotes. The problem is when they’re used in all seriousness. Your job as a writer is to compose the narrative in a consistent, effective format. If you use parentheses it’s tantamount to admitting that you’re not very good at that job. It says oh wait, here’s this other thing I forgot, here’s this other point I couldn’t work into the flow. They are a hiccup for the reader. They remind him he’s being narrated to, and on top of that they tell him he’s not being narrated to very well. Parentheses are easier to swallow in a first person narrative, but still try the sentence without them first to be sure they’re absolutely necessary. Odds are they’re not.

   I have very few problems with the em dash. In fact, I quite like it and prefer to use it where I might otherwise use a colon or parentheses. Just be careful not to overuse it. Especially in the case of dramatic introduction. It’s a great visual cue, almost cinematic in its effect, which makes it all the more tempting to overuse. Too many em dashes make your work read like a silly movie trailer or some investigative reports show on Fox.

   She thought he could get away with it—she was wrong. He’d entered a race against time—and he already was too late.

   Ellipsis. Another pet peeve. Use an ellipsis if you’re writing a paper and need to cut an unrelated clause from a passage you’re quoting. To be. . .that is the question. Like that. Do not, as many lazy or ignorant writers do, use an ellipsis to indicate a pause. That’s what commas are for. If it’s a lengthy pause use a period. If it’s a dramatic pause use an em dash. If it’s a notable pause in, say, dialogue, use that opportunity to narrate a pause. Describe a bit of body language to give the reader a sense of the character’s mood. Plenty of published authors use ellipses like this. Does that make it okay? I don’t know. Plenty of pop stars lip sync in concert. Does that mean you should?

2. Dialogue, Part I.

   As an extension of punctuation, here’s a quick look at how to punctuate and attribute dialogue. In an attributed line of dialogue—that is, one with he said / she said—the attribution is considered part of the same sentence. It is accordingly separated by a comma. Examples:

   He said, “Hi.”

   “Hi,” he said.

   In the first example the period is enclosed by the quotation marks. In the second example the comma is likewise enclosed. This is standard. The attribution-first construction of the first example is almost always more awkward than the attribution-second, but it is occasionally useful. Also, the comma in the first case is interchangeable with a colon.

   In the case of a line of dialogue interrupted or paused by a line of narrative pertaining to the speaker, and without attribution, use a period to separate dialogue from narrative.

   “I don’t know.” Jimmy bit his lip. “It just seems, y’know, wrong.”

   If you’re using a character’s name, there’s no hard and fast rule about whether to phrase the attribution as Name said or said Name. My rule is to use whichever sounds best in the particular instance. I consider the rhythm of the whole line, attribution included, and phrase accordingly. I do the same when deciding where to put the attribution in a longer line. Usually, but not always, I put it at the first natural pause. To expand on the second example:

   “Hi,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”

   If both halves of the dialogue are one sentence, that period after he said should be a comma. The whole line could also just as easily read:

   “Hi, I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said.

   I prefer the first version because, especially when attributing with names in a scenario with multiple speakers, it’s helpful to put the attribution early so the reader knows who’s speaking. It also tends to sound and read more naturally. Once a scene of dialogue has its rhythm established it becomes less necessary to indicate the speaker. In a scene with only two speakers you may drop the attribution entirely once it’s clear to the reader who is who.

   Generally, it’s best to stick to that he said / she said format. Even in the case of a question, the question mark is enough. You don’t also have to say he asked. In the case of varied delivery it’s suitable to use he screamed or she whispered or he laughed or she spat. Often even these aren’t necessary if your dialogue is written well enough to indicate how it’s said. Otherwise, stick to the basics. Don’t bother with he argued or she lectured or he indicated or she theorized. Instead, just write the dialogue well and the reader will know that it’s an argument or a lecture or whatever. If you’re writing it well then you’re being redundant with this kind of attribution.

   “Yes,” he agreed.

   Case in point. Redundant. Trust your writing and trust your reader to figure it out.

3. Show vs. Tell, Part I.

   “Show, don’t tell” is common advice in poetry, and it’s just as important in prose. At the basic level, it is the difference between explaining something that happened and describing the event itself, or signals of the event. For example: He didn’t like it. That’s telling. He frowned. That’s showing. Either line communicates the same sentiment, and there is a place for either technique in narrative writing.

4. Economy, Part I.

   What makes you a good writer is not using small words or big words, a few words or a million words. It’s a using each word well.

5. Description, Part I.

   As a reader I tend to forget long or meticulous descriptions. They’re grocery lists. Eyes like this, jaw like that, nose like this, hair like that. Who cares? Even if we as writers have a clear and complete picture in our head of a character, there’s only so minutely we can shape the reader’s imagination. At a certain level of detail we’re actually working against ourselves. The reader is overloaded with details so he forgets them all and either substitutes his own visuals, or, worse, chalks it up to crappy writing and abandons our story altogether.

   As a general rule, in any given description I give a broad view and one or a few striking details. Character, setting, object, whatever. It’s roughly like this, plus has x and y details. This is most effective to me as a reader, so it’s what I gravitate toward as a writer. The broad view is enough to get the reader into your ballpark. He might not share your exact vision of the character or the scene, but he’ll get the idea. If there’s anything particularly important—meaning intrinsic to the scene, the character or the plot—then include it as a detail.

   The office was a towering steel and glass affair with a twenty foot concrete H over the entrance.

   It doesn’t matter exactly how many floors, how tall, what colour glass, etc. You’re in my ballpark. Later when a saboteur places an explosive to tip the H onto the evil CEO on his way out the door, you’ll recall the H from the description.

   The detective had just returned from three weeks of drinking all night in front of his TV. Also known in law enforcement circles as a suspension.

   In this example nothing is actually said about the detective’s appearance, but you get a broad view that’s probably close enough to what I envision. A man nearing middle age, scruffy and possibly disheveled, probably has dark hair and may have chiseled features a la romance novel detectives. There’s no need for a grocery list description. If I really wanted any of those details explicitly understood, I’d include them. I’d append You could light a match on his cheek if it wouldn’t ignite the gin fumes still wafting off him, or some such line.

   That’s for people and things. This approach works for places too. I can’t count how many books I’ve stopped reading in the store because they opened with some socialist rendering of a scene. By socialist I mean each part is equal, each detail given the same priority and airtime. I find those descriptions blend together. By the time I reach the last article on the list, I’ve forgotten the first. The trees were like this, the bushes were like that, the stream was like this, the clouds were like that, the road was like this. Sometimes each article gets its own digressive inspection. That shit doesn’t matter. I see nothing wrong with a little fascism in description. Give a broad impression of the scene and pick a couple details to flush out, trusting that the reader will fill in any incidentals on his own.

   A reader’s intellect plays secretary to his imagination. If you appeal to the secretary, you’ll have to wait for the secretary to puzzle out your message, decide its priority, petition the boss for approval, etc. etc. In many cases it’s ideal to bypass the intellect and directly engage the imagination. I like to build my descriptions around a single image or metaphor that is sharp and palpable—one that is so immediate and identifiable that it blows right past the intellect and hooks the imagination. Get the boss’s attention and the secretary will fill out your paperwork in due course.

   For an example, because that’s a lot of vague talk, I’ll use a bit of description I’ve always been proud of. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something like clouds like handfuls of white sand blown across the sky. It’s simple and direct. It evokes an image without you having to work to construct it based on cues and clues. You might not picture the exact same clouds as I do, or as the next guy does, but unless the entire plot of the story hinges on the shape of said clouds, that’s entirely beside the point.

   A picture is worth a thousand words. A thousand words depreciate real fast when you spend them all on just one picture.

6. Adjectives & Adverbs.

   These are words that end up in every piece of writing, but they aren’t building blocks. It’s often easy to forget that. I include them naturally as I draft, even if I’ll pull them out or switch them around in revision. I cut down on this work in revision by drafting with a rule of thumb in mind:

   What’s the default?

   If the reader assumes a condition by default, I don’t bother adding a modifier to explain what’s already inferred. It was a dark night. Duh, right? If I say night you’re perfectly capable of assuming the dark part on your own. The ocean covered the horizon, blue and sparkling. If I say ocean what colour do you assume? Blue. You might even assume sparkling if I’ve already narrated the sun in the sky.

   The amount of work this saves me is tremendous. I only have to narrate a divergence from the norm. If, say, the ocean is green, because the scene is in the tropics. Or, to move on to adverbs, if someone is dancing awkwardly, or calmly falling, or praying lustily.

   In the case of adverbs, I don’t recommend like some ascetic editors to throw them out entirely. A lot of adverbs we forget are adverbs, and these we often can’t do without. Case in point: often. Also only, never, always.

   That said, there are whole hordes of adverbs you can do without. Employ the default rule. Is your character running? Don’t tell us he’s running quickly, it’s redundant. Don’t tell us he’s stroking his chin thoughtfully. Don’t tell us he’s yelling loudly. If you want to add drama to a particular event don’t rely on adverbs. A regular verb plus an adverb isn’t nearly as effective as a strong verb. A verb is a building block. Instead of saying she moved gracefully, try she sashayed or she swept or whatever paints the picture you want. If you’re tempted to use a verb + adverb combo, take a minute to see if there’s a verb already for the action you want to depict.

7. Sentence Variety.

   It is a courtesy to yourself and your reader to vary the structure of your sentences. Just how drastically you vary them is a matter of style and taste, but it is important that you do so.

   One bad habit I see a lot of in stories I’m given to critique is this construction: She did this as that other thing happened. Everything takes place as something else is taking place. Like every logical structure, the “as” sentence has its place. Also like every logical structure, that place is not everywhere.

   Another of my biggest pet peeves is this construction: Verbing this, he verbed that. Have you ever used this structure when you speak? Say it out loud. Tying his shoes, he left the house. Try using that construction when you’re telling ghost stories around the campfire. I dare you. Not only does it sound unnatural, it’s usually done so clumsily as to depict a contradiction. The verbs get in each other’s way. Have you ever walked out of the house at the same time as tying your shoes? If so, that lazy sentence doesn’t do justice to the humour of the scene. This structure is a last resort even in a famine of sentence variety.

8. Call A Spade A Spade.

   Opposite the note on variety, a note against it. If you’re tempted to use synonyms or alternate descriptions of a person, an object, etc., in a given scene, resist. This is another common bad habit. The narrator introduces a bottle of gin. In the next sentence it’s poured into a glass and referred to as the clear liquid. In another sentence it’s referred to as the deceptively water-like substance in the glass.

   If you want to describe a commonplace object or substance, consolidate your description and place it where the stuff first appears. From then on, refer to it by its common name.

   Likewise with characters. Resist the temptation to sprinkle relevant info throughout the text via references. Bill did this. The professor did that. The avid cyclist and father of three said this. Did I mention Bill is a professor and an avid cyclist and has three kids? This is just asking for hiccups. If you’re going to tell the reader something about a character, either do it at the character’s first appearance, or do it in a more natural way in a later scene, by showing the character at his work (oh, he’s a professor) or his time off (oh look he really likes to ride bikes) or at home (oh he’s procreated). Otherwise refer to each character by a standard name. It can be their first name, their last name, their title, whatever, so long as it is consistent.

   In general, if there’s already a word for what you want to say, use it. That’s what words are for.

That’s the basics. I may revise and expand this later based on new discoveries and suggestions. Stay tuned for next week’s course: 201, Advanced Technique.

~J

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

Welcome to Jon University. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. In this inaugural semester I’m offering a course in creative writing. I don’t normally preside in such an officious manner (fun though it may be), but I don’t see any sense being shy when offering advice on the brightest burning star in my sky.

The following advice is one part from me, nine parts from my peers, my lessers and my betters. In art very little is true or false. I deal in useful or useless. Put each piece of advice to the test for yourself, and, as I’ve done, keep what’s useful and discard the rest. The proof is in the pudding.

For those of you who prefer a set of credentials to knowledge that speaks for itself, I’ll give you a short bio. I write. You may read a few of my stories here and here. I am a published author. Just like Umberto Eco or the Olsen Twins. I read, I critique, I travel. If I were stranded on a desert island the five books I’d bring are the collected works of Shakespeare, Kitab-i-Iqan, Blood Meridian, a Chinese / English dictionary, and a blank book to write in. A blank book with many, many pages. If I didn’t have a pen I’d twist my hair into a nib and use my blood for ink.

I’ve divided my advice into four courses. 101, Basic Technique. 201, Advanced Technique. 301, Theory. 401, Practice. But first, a few points to give us a foundation, a context in which to orient ourselves:

1. The best fiction convinces us it’s real. Coleridge said poetic faith is the willing suspension of disbelief. That means the reader forgets he’s a reader. Whether he reads to escape, to understand or to explore — this is his business. Our business as writers of fiction is to help him experience, if only for a while, something that does not exist outside the imagination. If we write well, he will finish our story and say, “Oh wait, that didn’t happen to me, it’s just a story.” If we write poorly, he’ll realize this before he’s finished. His suspended disbelief will reengage. He might even quit reading. For lack of a technical term I call this a hiccup, and it is our enemy.
2. There are no good or bad writers. Just different stages of development. Each of us starts off writing poorly. Some of us choose to develop from there, others choose not to. That’s right, improvement is a choice. The term “body of work” is no coincidence. A body has lovely parts like eyes and curves, but it also has less attractive parts like armpits and an asshole. You will write armpits. You will write an asshole. It’s important to admit it and move on. Otherwise you’ll end up paralyzed, either by fear of failure or because you mistake poor early attempts for failed attempts. It is not a failure to write an asshole. Imagine a body without the ugly parts. It’d just be a face and cans and gams floating around in the air and what good is that.

   That said, forget the idea of classification. Each part is equally important in that without it a body of work is incomplete. Give each story the care and attention it deserves. Make it as good as you can now. The next one will be better.

3. Let me be clear about my position on the Rules vs. Exceptions debate. It is essential to learn the rules. It is wise, most of the time, to follow them. It is on occasion legitimate and powerful to break them. Any idiot could lie and call himself Spartacus — it’s doing it at just the right time, in just the right way, for just the right reason, that makes it an act and a measure of greatness.

Next week the class will be 101, Basic Technique.

Also, any suggestions for a mascot or a logo? I don’t think I’ve yet got the readership to run a contest. I’m going make a separate little zone on the website for these articles, maybe make a free PDF / lulu print version available.

~J